The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [2]
The interview is going very, very poorly. The interviewer is entirely unimpressed with the academic background the interviewee brings to the table, and feels the interviewee doesn’t have enough experience to provide tangible value in the chaotic environment of a real-world start-up.
Bryan Franklin, the dropout theater major, decided to hire someone else that day for the $10-an-hour administrative and data entry job he had posted on Craigslist a few days before.
Bryan had started a sound design business in college and got too caught up in building and running the business to finish his degree. Eventually, over three hundred feature films were edited or mixed at his studio, including Gladiator, The Last Samurai, and Artificial Intelligence. Bootstrapping the business from the ground up and never once taking on investor money, he eventually sold it in 2000, after Dody Dorn was nominated for an Oscar for editing the film Memento, which she cut at the studio. The sale of the company “bought me a house on Lombard Street in San Francisco,” as Bryan put it with a smile.
Now in early 2002, he was on his third self-made, self-funded, profitable business, and he needed an assistant, so he posted an ad on Craigslist, Bryan told me. “Within twenty-four hours, I had two hundred responses. Most of them had BAs, but there were also many masters’, several with JDs who had passed the bar, a few PhDs, and around six MBAs. The Harvard MBA got me curious. I put him on a shortlist. He was one of the ten or so I interviewed.
“He came to my house in a three-piece suit. I was talking to him about the website he was going to be doing data entry for at ten dollars an hour, and he was stuck in a very 1999 mentality about the Web. I don’t think he said the word ‘IPO,’ but I’m pretty sure he said the word ‘liquidity’ at some point in the interview.
“And I’m like, ‘Look, I’m looking for data entry and customer service. I want to make sure that when a customer calls, they feel taken care of.’
“And he said, ‘Well, you know, I think that we need to be strategic about which relationships we can leverage . . .’ And that’s kind of how the interview went. At one point he started saying, ‘So, there’s obviously several disparate paths involved and different priorities, so one of the things I’d do in my first week is build a priority matrix, so that we could reference . . .’ And I just had this picture in my mind of him building his priority matrix while I was doing all the work.
“I ended up hiring a young African American woman. She was a high school dropout, but she had a great work ethic and lots of street smarts. She ended up doing a terrific job over three years. She got several raises, and at one point was managing three people.”
There are, of course, many wonderful things you can learn in college, which have absolutely nothing to do with career and financial success. You can expand your mind, sharpen your critical thinking skills, get exposed to new ideas and perspectives, revel in the intellectual and cultural legacy of the world’s greatest thinkers. These are all worthy pursuits.
But the idea that simply focusing on these kinds of things, and getting a BA attesting to the fact that you have done them, guarantees you will be successful in life is going the way of company pensions, job security, and careers consisting of a single employer for forty years. More and more people—including people who haven’t even graduated college yet—are waking up to the reality that the old career and success advice is no longer adequate. We need to start taking some new advice.
Let’s say, in a tough market, you’d rather be Bryan Franklin than the Harvard MBA. In other words, you want to optimize your chances in life of being the one posting job ads during a recession instead of the one begging for the job. Let’s say you want to be the one hiring (either as an entrepreneur or as a leader within an organization),